Glen Schofield: Not much, but you do see him. Play to the end of the game. That's all I can say.

IGN: How much did you actively steer away from sci-fi stereotypes and conventions? I mean, you have the space setting, the destroyed frigate with aliens on-board – I smell Ridley Scott.

Glen Schofield: Yeah, so you're going to get that comparison, right? If you made a game in New York today, they wouldn't compare it to anything, because it's New York and it's today. But because it's science fiction, you're gonna get pointed because there are similarities to Alien, to Blade Runner, Star Trek or whatever. There's a few that stand out – and we did not want to be any of them. Love 'em all, watched 'em all, payed homage to them – but more, it was an homage to Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov – hence, 'Isaac Clark'.

That was more because, there's a theme that runs through the game that people might not pick up on. When I read Arthur Clark or Asimov – their ideas are that man is more important than he really is. And that goes to the heart of our really deep, deep story. The other thing is, their ideas are really huge. I was reading one Asimov story and he's like 'it's a billion years in the future'! [laughs]. 'And man is immortal'! Oh Jesus. [laughs]

And so, the idea with us: instead of just mining a planet, we completely tear apart a planet. That sort of comes from the 'big ideas' notion. 'A ship floating' idea really came about as 'how do I keep it claustrophobic?', while zero-G is very big and that makes sense on a ship, as do big spaces like the mining level.

The one place I think people will see 'Alien' the most? Well, there's an operating area. Okay, well, an operating area is going to be clean and sterile – and they're gonna be on a big ship – and people might say, 'oh, well I've seen that before'. But if you look at the detail – the beds we've created for instance, it's created with gothic design rules – a certain Dead Space iconic look, with a certain amount of ribbing and so on. You'll look at those and think, 'huh, that kind of matches his suit...' So we do things like that – a cafeteria is a cafeteria –

IGN: But it's a Dead Space cafeteria. Evil food? With ribbing?

Glen Schofield: [laughs] Well, blood in the food, maybe.

IGN: You got a pretty interesting writing team together for this – what's the story with Warren Ellis' involvement?

Glen Schofield: So, ah, with all due respect to Warren... Warren came at the very beginning of the game; we figured we needed a writer and Warren came in and we had our direction, our ideas. We knew we wanted a religion running through it and we knew we wanted psychological terror as well as grotesque terror. Warren is more of sci-fi writer; how many of these ideas are leftovers from what he wrote, I don't know – I'd have to go back a reread all his work. But he's just a good guy... we tried a bunch of writers. The one thing he really helped us out with was, when we first started to do the comic book, we asked Warren. He hit deadlines for us, he did everything right – but he came on two and-a-half years ago and some of the ideas filter out.

I think Warren also helped out on some of the back-story of the characters, the naming of them – because he was good at that. But what he did was he also introduced us to Anthony Johnson who became our writer for the comic series. Then Anthony eventually wrote most of the dialogue for the game. As a comic book writer, he mostly wrote in short sentences, which is what we need.

In space, no-one can hear you scream. Unless you're in the same general vicinity - in which case, yeah, they can hear you just fine.

IGN: In terms of length then, is there a clear narrative arc with a conclusion?

Glen Schofield: Absolutely. The game is played out on decks. You're on the Mining Deck, or you're on the Engineering Deck or the Medical Deck and things like that. And then the story itself is really big. It's a big interwoven story and you're learning and trying to figure out what happened here. Why are there no people? What is this ancient writing that's on the walls? What was buried in the planet? All that stuff. And it's a bit like an onion, in that you're peeling away layers and if you watch the video logs and read the text logs and stuff, you'll pick up on the story. And it's really about wrapping a lot of it up in the end.